At present I am researching the relationship between citizens and the built and natural environment. I am investigating suburban spaces in the Helsinki metropolitan area in the 1950s­–1970s by analysing both this relationship and suburbs as multisensorially significant, sedimented, lived environments. In the study I connect suburban planning and writing and the perspectives of residents. Second, I am investigating urban nature, the place of nature in urban planning and building, and the significance of nature in city dwelling in new urban districts constructed from the 1980s onwards in Helsinki, Stockholm and New York. I am particularly interested in the role and relationship of planned and unplanned elements of urban spaces, architecture, landscaped green areas and ambiguous features of urban nature, such as wasteland, in the moulding of the historically, aesthetically and experientially sedimented environment.

The studies are part of an interdisciplinary project I am leading, funded by the Academy of Finland, called Nature in Arts, Culture, and History. Temporal Sedimentations of Landscape and the Diversity of Nature.

In the project we are investigating the interaction between natural and cultural elements and processes in shaping the environment through two scenic extremes – urban nature and wilderness. Both are to be understood as spatially and temporally sedimented hybrids of human and non-human factors and processes. Our project, which emphasises environmental research in the humanities (archaeology, aesthetics, art- and environmental history), is engaged in active dialogue with scholars in the natural sciences and particularly with urban ecologists. We were involved as planners and participants in the symposium Urban Nature, held in October 2015 in New York and arranged by the Finnish Cultural Institute of New York and The New School. It was wonderful to collaborate once more with my close colleague from my Christina Institute days, Leena-Maija Rossi, Executive Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.